Baseline for Kollam court reform; Electricity outages in Delhi;

One of the most important weak links holding India back is the legal system. A high quality judiciary is fundamental to a competitive market economy and competitive political system. Important new work has begun, for one case type for one district court, in trying to rethink how district courts work [link, link].

Good intentions do not suffice in the world of public policy. Policy makers need to be grounded in principles of freedom, checks and balances, liberal democracy, the price system, public choice theory and limitations of state capability. In addition, the policy process requires a process of iterative refinement, where outcomes are measured (not just effort) and policy design is steadily modified so as to fare better. For this, it is important to measure the baseline. We need to write down the report card prior to the reform, and then we can watch things change (or fail to change).

Writing on The Leap Blog on 21 November, Siddharth Raman documents the baseline for the Kollam court reform.

One of the outrageous features of the Indian electricity system is voltage / frequency fluctations and power outages. This is a tax upon modernity. Substantial capital costs and process overhead is imposed upon all firms and households in trying to deal with this. It is a `quality of service’ failure: the customer is paying the full price for electricity but getting something that is sub-standard. It is tantamount to paying for a 100 gram packet of biscuits but actually getting 70 grams. These failures of the Indian electricity system are one of the important impediments faced by manufacturing in India.

Upasa Borah and Renuka Sane of Trustbridge Rule of Law Foundation have been studying this problem. They got an article out on The Leap Blog on 25 September, A review of outage reporting by Indian discoms. The next step in their research program is An analysis of electricity outages in Delhi: 2024-25, published on The Leap Blog on 6 December.

Here, they evaluate the transparency and reliability of power supply data from Delhi’s three private distribution companies. By extracting and cleaning fragmented reporting from BSES Rajdhani, BSES Yamuna, and Tata Power, they reveal significant inconsistencies in how outages are recorded and categorized across different spatial units. They find that while outages are frequent, a lack of standardised reporting on "redundancy" and consumer-level impacts makes it difficult to assess actual service reliability or hold providers accountable.